The largest sales include “designer.co.uk” selling for $121,008, “lundi.fr” (French for “Monday”) selling for $69,235, and “comtech.com” selling for $60,000. Dots News owner and writer Andrew Naylor’s sold “isdb.com” which tied with “golfzone.com” for fourth place.

Sedo had a good week with a nice six-digit sale, while total sales dropped to $778,261 and the median dropping to $2122. The total number of domains sold (over $700) increased to 182, which indicates that volume is consistent.

The largest sales this week include “website.de” selling for $143,136, “bookkeepers.com” selling for $34,000, “juegos-gratis.com” (“free games” in Spanish) for $26,179, and a great two letter .ORG “ch.org” sold for a reasonable $21,775.

Sedo announced sales figures for last week when they sold 174 domains for $860,305. The total was down significantly from the previous week by almost $1 million, with the number of domains sold dropping by almost 14%. The median Sedo sales price kept steady at $2439, up slightly from $2400 last week.

The largest sale this week was Free-SMS.de which went for $164,209, with ConnectionExpress.com taking second place at $30,000. The most undervalued sale was Podium.com which went for only $12,902.

Two six-digit sales pushed Sedo’s weekly numbers up higher than usual, but the median dropped a bit to $2,400. The two big sales were credit.fr for about $850,000 and migraine.com for $125,000. There were sixteen five-digit domains including mysports.com for $60,000, items.com for $50,000, and cityhotels.com for $40,000.

This kind of money pouring into the domain aftermarket is heartening for domain investors to see this early in the year. It should be no surprise to see finance and healthcare taking the top two spots, as those were hot throughout 2009.

There were three major remodels last week: Sedo, Dotster, and Dynadot. While the reviews have been mixed, I would say that Dynadot was the most successful of the bunch and not just because they were the only company to leave a login form on the homepage.

Sedo

The largest of the three companies–both in terms of revenues and employees–they made the most dramatic changes. They simplified the homepage, added photos of smiling women to every page, and changed their javascript menus to be more stylish. Unfortunately, the new menus are impossibly difficult to use. The site is still slow with some pages (“Statistics” tab under “Domain Parking”) taking 10 seconds to load, possibly because their web servers are in Europe which makes it slow for US customers. With simplicity comes complexity, as it now takes me two additional clicks to reach the parking “Overview” page. Unfortunately, the default page (“Statistics”) under “Domain Parking” is also the slowest page. I timed how long it took me to get to the “Overview” page at 22 seconds after initially typing in the Sedo homepage URL.

One of Sedo’s challenges has long been their ability to keep currency punctuation and the URL consistent while browsing their website. Even now the “Price” dropdown on the domain search page and parking “Overview” page use the German punctuation instead of English. Despite minor bugs like this, I give Sedo a lot of credit for customizing their website. I am aware of many US-based websites in the domain industry that do not give the option of German punctuation.

While I’m not super happy about the website operations for parking customers, the homepage has definitely improved by changing focus from the small ticket domain auctions to end-user domain buyers. With their high volume of buyers, I would expect these changes to improve their sales numbers. I think a lot more could be done to better accommodate domain buyers, to help them navigate the huge number of domains that Sedo has listed but that’s better explored in another article.

Dotster

With a history of redesigns that added unnecessary complexity and bugs that are subsequently never fixed, this redesign (version 7) continues that trend. Where the last redesign marginalized the bulk domain name search with bugs and obfuscation, this redesign removes the bulk domain search functionality from the homepage and leaves unfixed the “select all” bug created in version 6 that adds “taken” domains to your shopping cart.

They also updated their logo to be more 3D by adding a shadow, and thinned out the font:

Old Logo

New Logo

The new simplified homepage is a huge improvement over the last version and places web hosting as the primary product offered. Domain registrars have increasingly relied on webhosting to increase profit margins in an industry where registry fees are high and price competition among registrars is tight.

Like Sedo, they removed the login form from the homepage and placed all design efforts at attracting new customers. Unfortunately they seem to have messed up the Account Management Control Panel:

Dotster Bug

Dynadot

The Dynadot redesign included a new logo, a slightly redesigned homepage, and an increase in registration prices. There was no real change to the functionality of the site, the most significant change in functionality was the consolidation of marketing boxes along the right side of the homepage. The reason I liked the Dynadot redesign the most was because they did not make it more difficult for existing customers to use the website, and the new logo is an improvement.

Old Logo

New Logo

Sedo had a down week reporting sales of just 150 domains for a total of $824,830. Sedo’s median sales price jumped up to $2,850 thanks to the six digit sale of IDN domain name büromöbel.de (“office furniture” in German, “xn--brombel-d1a4c.com” in IDN) and 14 other five digit sales. The top five sales included:

büromöbel.de    $101,064
spb.com    $65,000
arenal.com    $40,000
mylikes.com    $40,000
apps.net    $25,900

December traditionally is a down month for domain sales because there are usually few if any domain auctions or trade shows.

A Russian blog reported that an unknown buyer has purchased Russia.com through Sedo for $1.5 million. The whois record indicates that the transfer is in process, a good indicator that the money is in escrow and the deal will close.

The company selling the domain is NewMedia Holdings, a big player in the country geo domain space who registered a number of good domains back in May of 1995. Some of those domains included:

Airplanes.com
AutoRacing.com
Birds.com
HorceRacing.com
Musicians.com
StockMarkets.com

In December of 2004 whois ownership changed from Virtual Countries, Inc to NewMedia Holdings, Inc. At the same time they changed ownership details on their website from Virtual Countries to Paley Media. Currently their websites indicate ownership by NewMedia Holdings and operations by Paley Media. NewMedia’s website mentions that Virtual Countries was founded by Gregory Paley in 1995 and is he is now chairman of NewMedia.

In Sedo’s November newsletter e-mailed to customers and clients they announced two domains for sale by NewMedia Holdings: Airplanes.com and Birds.com. A quick search of NewMedia domains on Sedo showed that NewMedia may have put all their country domains for up sale this month. NewMedia opened their account with Sedo in January of this year. There is no indication why NewMedia is listing their domains for sale but with such a nice portfolio there may be more sales to come.

Sedo reported healthy sales last week of 202 domains for a total of $943,205. Sedo’s median sales price remained high at $2467, in part because so many of the single character .BIZ and .DE auctions were completed.

The highest priced domains were i.de for $73,348, e.biz for $66,001, and tp.de going for $29,938. One of the most timely sales was cyberfriday.com for $8,001 closing just a week before cyber Friday. They have already developed a website and appear to have hit the ground running.

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Sedo had a banner week with two huge six digit sales: Software.co.uk for $245,638 and Sudan.com for $120,000. They continued closing sales from the single character .BIZ auction from a couple weeks ago. You may also have a sense of deja vu because Sedo sold $1.1 million the previous week as well.

Sedo reported sales of 143 domains totaling $1,156,338 for an average sale of $8,086 with a median price of $2,510. The median price is a good indicator of where most of their domains were sold, and is commonly higher than other domain listing services. Entire list of domains follows.

In an e-mail to Sedo customers earlier this morning Sedo announced the Intellectual Property Management Company. This new company is alternatively listed as a subsidiary of United Internet Group and Sedo, and elsewhere as joint venture of Sedo and member of the United Internet Group. According to their website they offer services including registrations, transfers, and renewals for ccTLDs, gTLDs, and IDNs, DNS hosting, SSL certificates, and domain acquisitions through Sedo.

They offer two levels of DNS management, “basic” and “premium.” DNS and SSL certificates may not sound like a logical addition to an IP management service but United Internet has significant DNS and SSL infrastructure associated with their webhosting business. This makes it easy to integrate these services into their domain portfolio management tools. Maintaining SSL certs across multiple registrars can sometimes be difficult, so adding cert management to domain portfolio management is a good idea.

Oddly enough, the Intellectual Property Management Company may not be leveraging United Internet’s SSL cert infrastructure. Looking closer at each company’s cert indicates that Sedo and 1and1 use Thawte certificates while the Intellectual Property Management Company is using Comodo. Other large hosting companies including GoDaddy and Network Solutions have become “self-signing” certificate authorities and United Internet may be considering such a path if the Intellectual Property Management Company sees significant customer demand in this area.